Band Madness

As my NCAA bracket slowly disintegrates into a huge waste of ten dollars, it's recently come to my attention that single-elimination tournament-style bracketing is no longer just the province of athletes and sports fans. In the recently published book The Enlightened Bracketologist experts gives a single-elimination breakdown to subjects as diverse as game show catch phrases and conspiracy theories. I've even found that I can use the system as a way of simplifying otherwise impossible decisions in my life. For instance, if I want to decide what brand of breakfast cereal I want to buy, instead of just looking at the shelf at the store and making an ill-conceived snap-judgement, I can just put together a system of brackets, like so:






















. . . and, after a mere 20 minutes of tabulation, I have insured that Cracklin Oat Bran is indeed the champion of all processed grain products. . . Oh fuck, I kind of do want some Lucky Charms. . . Damn.

This past week, the lovely people at Stereogum have alerted me to a parallel tournament to the NCAA that's a bit closer to my areas of interest. The Band Madness tournament pits pop musicians against one another (and possibly against themselves - i.e. the Beatles vs. Paul McCartney or Lou Reed vs. VU) and users log onto the site to vote for who they think should win in each matchup, allowing people to rack their brain over such troubling decisions as, which you find least irritating, Chicago or Ani DiFranco (duh, it's obviously Chicago). Of course, this hardly stands as any kind of authoritative survey of anything other than the tastes of (white, male) music geeks with an overabundance of free time. And just like all the retards that picked Notre Dame to win over Winthrop last week (myself included) this generally tends to prove that people will go for what they know over what's best (which is the only way I can rationalize My Chemical Romance beating out Ween). While I assume that the Beatles will win this just like they do every other arbitrary pop music poll, Nine Inch Nails apparently won this last year, so who knows? I'll obviously be pushing for Foreigner.